


Because Ghosts

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural RPF
Genre: Eating Disorders, Kinda College AU?, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Pretty laid back for all these tags though..., Substance Abuse, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-01
Updated: 2015-01-01
Packaged: 2018-03-04 19:10:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3084359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jared's had a terrible summer, what with all the hereditary insanity, possible hauntings, and Jensen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Because Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [riyku](https://archiveofourown.org/users/riyku/gifts).



> I started with a prompt for shy!Jared and punk-rock!Jensen college AU, dear Riyku, but this thing had a mind of its own and took off in weird directions. 
> 
> Thanks to ephermeralk for all her help. You're awesome, bb <3
> 
> Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. (though belated)

**Because Ghosts**

 

The train tracks ran along the beach.

Stupid—everyone knew salt corroded things. The speedboat beached in the sand was a lethal ground of rust, verdigris and rotted plastic because of the salt. The old green starfish restaurant had been bleached yellow by it. In the _sofrito_ -scented streets where they told the future in the ashes of cigars, they had magic that fought the salt of misfortune. _La_ _sal_. But the train tracks ran without break and without station. If you followed them past where the sun shone white and the chilling wind blew sand across the rails, there was a spot where they went to turn.

Jared didn’t scream when he saw the girl.

She wasn’t even a girl no more—fleshpink oodles all over, scraps of brown, a doll with its stuffing torn out. He saw the black ribbon draped over the rail, the one with the _Speedy Gonzales_ pin, and thought, _EAT ME._ Then his brain worked backwards and he thought: _Alice_.

The scene collapsed around Jared, flattened like a photograph.

He saw the girl and didn’t know where he went, _in_ side, _out_ side, out of himself. There were bits of broken seashells under his nails for him to suck into his mouth; they shattered further like glass between his teeth, and he shook, bloodied his tongue, thought, _interesting; all very interesting._

He couldn’t remember what he was doing here. That was pretty interesting too. Thought maybe something had called him here, halfway through doing something else; some quiet voice like a ghost.

And the pigeons and gulls milling above must have told them, or maybe they saw it in their _panatela_ ashes, because here were the boys from Alice’s street—on their bikes, swarm of bright-colored young things, riding towards the accident. Jared had icy consternation pooling in his belly. He looked toward the sea changing color and the sun going bright, and felt the light pierce through his eyes, make him unsteady. He looked back at the boys and found Jensen, easily, because he looked so different from the rest of them.

Jensen’s mother had run away when she was sixteen, lived out of two suitcases in places like Rio, like Reno, where there were more people than anyone could possibly bear, all trying to take a bite out of her soul. Walt Whitman might sing the body electric and say there’s no greater pleasure than being surrounded by people, but Jared’s sure that’s not actually true. Anyway, she returned at twenty-three: same two suitcases, same flashing-eyed girl, only with a halfway swollen belly. Her eyes were like drops of ink. Her baby’s weren’t.

The gold in his hair glittered in the sun; a buttery, warm halo. It hooked Jared’s gaze, forced him to imagine things— stupid, sick little brain of his. Dead girl all around his feet, a fleet of avengers rushing at him, and he thought of Nilda’s bodega, little shampoo bottles arranged on mottled wood. Thought of fingers teasing out knots in sun-bleached hair, thought _I know exactly what your hair smells like._ Thought of late afternoons in the Parracia house basement with Jensen’s eyes paring his soul, converging comically when Jared bumped his finger to the quirk in his nose; his mouth tasting sticky and sweet, like some creature of jam.

The tracks were vibrating. There couldn’t be a train coming, though, not this fast. The boys were shouting. The air was heavy with it—that, and the reek from the tracks. It was heady and dizzying, weighted with the last gasp of summer, and Jared’s mouth tasted like salt and the sea and sickness. His hair was in his eyes, which made looking at the boys like looking at dolls, with parts of them gone. He pushed it away. Straightened the camera hanging around his neck. Took off his shoes; very, very carefully. They were new. They were white and sky-blue, and he hadn’t grown into them yet. His bare feet looked very white against the cool grass, very bright, toes curling into the green.

And then it wasn’t grass but mud, wasn’t mud but gravel, and he was flying: far from dead girls on tracks, and boys with bright flashing eyes.

He thought he heard Alice all the way, asking him to stop, _come back._

*

That was six months ago.

*

On the first day of Orientation, Jared’s dad got so flustered by the crowd that he backed the car into someone’s lustrous little Tesla, and in the resulting shouting match that drew curious eyes, Jared also spied a cluster of narrow ink-black ones, offset in sharp contrast by a single pair of green.

“Dad,” he mumbled, an uncomfortable heat creeping up his spine. When all Dad did was escalate his tones, rampant insults flying like his father had just been keeping them carefully in a snake-box and couldn’t control them anymore, Jared tumbled back into the dark cocoon of their car, and hoped the witches weren’t putting a spell on him. He’d known Jensen was going here too—of course he knew—although he hadn’t quite expected the entourage.

But here they all were. Proud family; here to see off their first college boy and all that jazz. Frankly, _las_ girlfriends looked scary. And they were attracting eyeballs too, in their bright clothes and shining silver spirit-deterring jewelry, and all the _masa_ and magical _tamalera_ or whatever else they were carrying around in violently blue plastic boxes to somehow sail Jensen through the first term without him turning into a _zombi_.

Jared saw Jensen’s gaze skitter over his Dad and ducked down quickly, looked at his own feet until he knew for sure that Jensen was looking away from the car, away from him. He peeled bits of sticky fabric from the seat-covers, almost chewed, looked up again and got slapped by the wind-chill of Jensen’s stare.   

The last time they met each other’s eyes, Jensen was pond-green, as if worked through by an Instagram filter. There was maybe a foot of water between them. The sunlight glittered off the single gothic crucifix in Jensen’s ear, swept a shimmering arc over his hairline so he looked to be possessed of a dime-store halo, just like that time at the tracks, with Alice. Just: whetted, sharpened, decanted to a purer quality. As if he was fierce avenging angel to Jared’s too-tame-for-hell demon, and doing something more drastically world-changing than just trying to drown him.

When he smiled, he smiled like Alice, and that’s how Jared knew he wasn’t himself.

_(did you push her?)_

The water was cold in Jared’s lungs, salty from sea-intrusion. Sometimes he thought it was still there, pressing against all his bones and organs like a dam waiting to burst, and he wondered, _what if_. There was a special horror in closing his eyes and letting his thoughts come, falling over each other too quick to be deciphered. He saw himself twice then: that boy who drowned and this boy now, with six months and a ghost between them, and he wasn’t sure which one was better off. Or if any of this had even happened. Wished he’d taken a picture, with the special roll he kept in his pocket for situations like these.

_(did you?)_

 “ _Las_ girlfriends, eight o’clock,” Jared’s Dad said, finally past squabbling over the Tesla. His funny little laugh didn’t quite make the cut. “I’m afraid, that with you out of the picture, those women are going to break in and murder me in my sleep. Or throw me in the sea.”

 “Maybe you should cook them something,” Jared muttered. “Sign a nonaggression treaty.”

His Dad laughed. Then he paused, looking with consternation over the door of the car to where Sonia stood, glaring daggers at them. “I would, if I weren’t so scared of them.”

They walked through campus once, all the different buildings so stout and strong, brown in the manner of things built before the eighteenth century, banners and flags flying, all the trees like spare Egon Schiele sketches, and Jared thought, _no, I can’t live here,_ the panic rising in him till he wanted to just run, run and never stop. He looked at the buildings instead through the lens of his camera. Smaller, sharper, focused. And then he could feel something swerve in his brain, the flip of a switch, and he was calm again.

They ate from a ridiculous campus food-truck parked in the lawns that apparently served fantastic BLT. Jared made a show, as if food was porn and he worshipped at its altar, but threw away most of his. Judging by the way his Dad’s face got after that, he wasn’t fooling anyone.

When it was time for him to leave, his dad said “You’ll be okay,” like a charm, three times, his face crumpling faster every time he did. Jared couldn’t bear it; took his hand and then walked quickly away, saw Jensen and his group of fussing finch-like women saying their emotional goodbyes, skipped over the stone steps leading into his dormitory and found escape.

*

Some sort of tradition here, mess-night—everyone was in shapeless black college gowns, crow-like, wheeling blindly into each other and starting conversations. They began with phrases that sounded entirely like a randomization generator was hiding somewhere from Jared, spitting them out for the rest of them to use.

Jensen’s hair was green for mess-night dinner.

There wasn’t even _time,_ thought Jared. Between having to pick up books and sign up for things and set up their living spaces. His legs felt like they’d fall off, he’d barely managed to run a brush through his hair, and Jensen’s hair was green.

Jared stared till a voice in his head said, _you look like a besotted scarecrow._ Easy enough in black and with his height. Then he fooled around with his dinner, trying to make conversation while all the time he obsessed silently over what he was doing, felt like the insides of his head was ringing with the pressure it took to smile, felt his throat going dry at really having nothing to say, or worrying that he was saying too much. Not a good day today up in cuckoo-land, and he just wanted to get away.  Someone was passing around a bottle, possibly sophomores who’d filled the thing up with some sort of deadly cocktail, and Jared took two mouthfuls, which was enough to disconnect his head from his neck. There were girls laughing, all their voices like ice-picks in his brain. In between conversations he looked around at the walls, at the grim portraits of people who looked eerily alike, each pair of eye heavy with the violent power of exorcists.

 _I have a ghost,_ he thought suddenly. He walked up to them and didn’t know what he was doing, but inside his head a sea crashed: _I have a ghost, a ghost, a ghost._

He looked back at the tables and Jensen was looking right at him. Jensen was one of those boys who were so beautiful you didn’t know what to do with them. He was scary and flawless, and all the ink and silver just made him more so. And sometimes he was unreadable, like now, that almost-soft expression on his face maybe meant for Jared, the way his mouth half-opens like he wanted to say—

_(did you push her?)_

Or maybe Jared was just drunk.

He floated out after that, balloon-head held on by a string, and sat on the steps outside. The courtyard was spiked with light, but beneath the arches the steps were shrouded in dark.

Jared sat, and dreamed of girl-bones under train tracks and girl-scalp stuck on steel, of Jensen’s fingers wet ‘round his neck pressing in bruises that said _Alice_ , of Jensen’s face above the water—beloved, sacred, profane, probably just a nightmare—of chalk pieces and pain _._

What Jared and his dad called _las_ girlfriends were actually part of a family that’s stayed on the beach for as long as Jared’s have. They lived in a brightly painted row of houses just off a street that led to the beach—a street of strung-up silver wards and garlic charms draped on doors, chicken-blood spells, too many lovebirds, bicycles, kids, and accents that spanned the variety of Tabasco, Guatemala, and just generic Spanish.

In contrast, Jared lived in a restaurant that was the shape of a giant green starfish, its sloping five arms making up the roof. There was the green pond in the backyard where he almost drowned—once for sand-strewn visitors to splash in, now for calm pieces of plastic to swim serenely on the surface—the whole thing stuck in that dying Americana aesthetic country singers milked. The restaurant had stood on the beach forever, all of that green paint now peeling and fading to the shade of an over-ripe avocado. When the tide was high, the spray sometimes hit the top of the starfish, and it sounded like ghosts knocking while you slept under. You could wake up and not know your name, until that disconsolate sound swept all about you, _wow-eee-ee-ee,_ with such wildness that you pinched yourself to remember.

 _Las_ girlfriends, or their ancestors, used to tell a story about how there was _bad magic_ in the family that ran the restaurant, _bad magic_ that they paid off by not being able to eat normal, human food. Just sneak in their backyard and see what they eat, late at night when no one’s around, _see._ Chalk, sand, soft ground glass, print-paper and plastic, little strips of cement.

It was true; it ran in the family. This disease. Single symptom: compulsive consumption of non-nutritional things. Nothing magic about it, nothing lovely. It had a name like a hammer driving a nail home: _pica._

Jared rolled it around his tongue once, _pie-ka,_ twice, till it lost its meaning and became another word, odd and alien and bad-tasting in his mouth. Just another word like any other word, like _monstrosity_ or _exhaustion_. Just a word, _pica,_ no more like blood-tang and chalk-paste, cramps like monsters in his gut.

Madness ran in the family.

He’d lost a month or two on that, on _pica_ , and Alice—quiet months, soft in the middle and sharp at edges, sodden months the petrol blue shade of 50mg tablets— and when he’d come back everything was quieter.

Even the surf.

Even Jensen.

No one wanted to know madness. Not even second-hand.

*

Jared got a job at the end of Orientation: helping out at the library, and with the added money that brought in, college worked out somewhat smoothly. He crashed through reading material whole chapters at a time, found some people—Katie at the coffee shop with her protest-flyers, Chad in the union who sold him ice-cream at flat 50 percent—and it was easy to talk to them, watch games, meet their friends _and_ the friends of their friends once he knew well enough what to say and do around them.  He knew he somewhat failed at being categorized: he wasn’t introverted or shy, just preferred a calm steadiness to sail him through.

His classes were staggered, and it wasn’t until the fourth or fifth week when the first course in photography rolled around that he realized he and Jensen were in the same class, adjacent roll numbers.

Silly, silly, he should have known.

“—never this quiet back home,” Jensen was telling a pretty dark-haired girl when he—finally—walked in. He’d been to the library, had too many books in his arms. “They’re loud, but it’s kinda nice. Sonia’s got turtles, spent half the summer trying to teach them how to race. And the horror stories—”

Jared knew a few of the horror stories Jensen knew: the one about his family, the one about the train tracks, but the one about Alice was the worst, because he didn’t know the beginning of it.

 _I haven’t been well,_ he thought, leaning over his book, scribbling it down in case he forgot. _I haven’t been well; I could have pushed her._ He cut out the sentence, drew an angry black line across the words, and wrote instead: _you saw someone die violently, it fucked you up._

But then, he thought, he was already fucked up when Alice died.

Jared closed his notebook, shut away the incriminating words, and did it with unhurried hands that felt unsure, uncertain, alien.

*

For a somewhat small campus offering not many courses, it was somehow too easy to not run into someone if you didn’t want to. Jared had raucous, adventurous friends who didn’t take no for an answer; Jensen seemed to amass a cult-like following of people who all seemed to be into the same things as him, only never as passionate, never as religious.

Jared thought about Jensen though, the way he did through the Quiet Months—a crazy kaleidoscope of half-dream and half-real images. He used to play true or false with them. _True,_ that last exam they gave at school, Jensen at the desk in front of him, winking and tapping Morse code for objectives—a system they developed forever ago to cheat on pop quizzes. _False,_ Jensen grinning, sitting in scrubs at the edge of Jared’s bed, playing _Nine Inch Nails_ with his fingers whispering over Jared’s ankle, while Dr. Cusmano explained why trepanning was a wonderful way to cure diseases of the brain. _(Let’s just drill a hole and hope we hit gold!)_ There was a picture of Dr. Cusmano too, on his special roll, which he had never developed. _True,_ biking down a hill in eighth grade one golden afternoon, running through the street without being seen, letting out Flor Rosa’s petulant doves from their bright cages. Also _true,_ the bright red ear Jensen sported for a week afterward.   _False,_ any sign of Jensen when Jared’s mother died when he was fifteen—of toxicity, of _pica_. _True,_ two weeks after, school library, quick apology in the form of Jensen pinning his arms behind his back—Nilda’s sugar-sweet shampoo scent dizzying and all pervasive around them. He kissed Jared’s lips first, and then his dick through his school pants, so he felt the damp and the burning warmth of Jensen’s mouth before he even processed what Jensen had done. And then the halfway-surprised look on Jensen’s face, pink blush and bright eyes, his quick retreat.

Jared didn’t want him to go, would have offered himself up then and there, but it took five whole minutes of gaping wordlessly at dust motes swirling through the library’s skylight before his voice even came back.

Also very _true_ : the big Parracia home on the street, lazy hot late afternoon in the basement with GTA Vice City on auto replay clashing with _Rage Against the Machines_ , loud enough to fool the entire street. _True,_ _El gata negra_ charms on the dirty window, and also a corn-husk doll that Jensen said was to improve ‘virility’, how funny.

 _True,_ Jensen running his fingers through Jared’s hair, telling him that he wanted his mouth, the length of his throat. _I don’t know how,_ Jared had said, but oh, he learned, to take him in as far as he could, to not gag, to suck and tease and know when Jensen was close by the cadence of his breath.

Here was something that straddled the space between _true, false_ and all the _maybes:_ sixteenth birthday, in the midst of exams, and he was not sure _whose_ birthday. But he had his physics book open, edges wet from sea-spray, pens scattered in the sand by his feet. He was drawing toes, sunrays, fat manatees—anything that was dredged up and out of his brain without thinking. His eyes stung, throat sore for days, swallowing hurt.

“So,” Jensen said, blackening out the lenses in his diagram of the interferometer, “I stole this from Sonia, but hearsay is that it’s good for your throat.”

 _‘This’_ was a weird mix of herbs. Jared watched Jensen draw paper from his pocket—a flourish, always fancy, _presto!—_ and use _The Concept of Relativity_ as a funnel to fill the mix in evenly.

“You know the taxi game? Those guys do it rough, but—” Jensen grinned. He lit the roll, flipped it, and put the cherry tip in his mouth. His fingers in Jared’s hair, pulling him closer, and he parted his lips, pressed his mouth to Jensen’s, felt bitter sage and sweet mullein smoke fill his mouth, sneak up to soothe his mind. Hold, let go, another breath—and the world rang pretty, like peals of bells.   

History was anti-erotic fog, not offering up many clues, but Jared didn’t waste time on figuring out the time and place when Jensen started hating him. Not when he had these memories. Jared replayed it in vivid detail, reconstructed, extrapolated in ways that made him nearly stuff his fist in his mouth so he wouldn’t scream, while his other hand fisted his dick, stripping it fast and sloppy, _true-false-true_ running in a litany through his head while he seeped sticky through his fingers.

Also _true:_ not knowing they’d been allotted the same semi-private darkroom.

Jared was there early on Monday, his prints already in the processing trays before Jensen even showed: yawning, his teeth pink in the sodium vapor light. Jensen’s T-shirt had a screaming face. A flattened coin lay flat against his chest, catching the light and glinting ominously. Around it were feather charms, their shafts made of railroad spikes, melted and reshaped— the special kind that Ezequiel and Flor Rosa made and sold in their bodega by the beach—to keep away all evil.

Jensen froze for a second, his gaze warped by the lights. Then he turned and started rooting around in the paper-safe.

“Hi,” he said, muffled.

“Hi.”

That cumbersome quiet again.

Jared took a deep breath and blurted, “Why is your hair green?”

Silence. Then: “It was a thing to do,” Jensen shrugged. “Better the hair than moping ‘round missing home.” He poked around with the enlarger, searching doggedly for something, until the safelight came on. “This stuff is pretty fancy, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

 _Scintillating conversation,_ thought Jared, sardonic. But it was something _._ _Something_ could be worked on, whetted, varnished and polished and brightened. It was better than its dark twin, nothing, which only ever sat in a corner, crusting over, refusing to move, and he was better that that. _They_ were better than that.

*

A weird thing kept happening to Jared.

It started in the second month of his first term and then didn’t stop.

He’d walk into his room and find mud on the floor, tracks of dirt that led to a pair of shoes he didn’t remember getting back. White and sky blue, only muddy, and when he’d turn them over, watery red liquid would slosh all over the floor. He couldn’t name it, and he didn’t try. Sometimes you need to make calculations like that.

He yelled out loud in surprise the first time it happened, dropped the shoes, and when his heart had steadied to something resembling normalcy, he threw them in the trash.

They came back again the next day. And the next.

 _Jesus fucking Christ,_ he thought on the third day, and sat on the edge of his bed staring at them like they would disappear if he just concentrated really hard. Somewhere inside him a sob built, iron-weight, gear-toothed thing that would mean madness if he let it rip out. He grabbed the shoes instead, water and all, and went to throw it out again.

In the third week or so, he pushed them under his bed instead.

“There,” he told them, frayed and quiet, kneeling to look at them sitting there in the dark and dust. He bit his lip but not too hard, not enough to draw blood. It was still okay if he didn’t bleed, he was not crazy. “Not ignoring you now.”

He took a picture with the special roll, shaking hands and unfocussed eye through the lens, just to make sure they were real, and then couldn’t develop it for fear that they were not.

Jensen’s photographs were of pillars and columns, stone-things that were safer to click than soft-things like people. They hung from pegs in the darkroom, and something was wrong with them: exposure, maybe, but they looked like they had ghosts all over. A whole town, a whole _country_ of ghosts; hiding in black and white photographs.

There was one on their shared wet-side today. Vintage spook wrapped around a campus monolith. If you twisted your head to the side, you could make it look like any ghost you wanted. Grandmother, mother, Alice.

“Trick I saw on the internet,” Jensen said, by means of starting conversation. “Sorta creative ruin, but it’s unpredictable.”

His smile was strange, testing waters, and nothing made any sense to Jared anymore. It was driving him crazier, this rift, this— whatever between them. He looked at Jensen and wanted nothing more than to touch him, but instead he asked, “Why did you say that?”

Jensen dropped something that clattered and rolled towards Jared, coming to rest at his feet. “Say what?”

“Back there,” Jared said, out-of-control mouth, speaking through fingers that wouldn’t shut him up, sounding almost impatient, “Jensen, what you said. At the pond.”

_(did you push her?)_

Jensen came close, to pick up whatever he’d dropped. He looked confused. “I didn’t say anything. If anything, you were the one who told me to fuck off.”

Jared didn’t think— or if he did, he’d have wondered why he wasn’t breaking in half from the water in his lungs, from the chalk, from everything—but he didn’t, just shoved Jensen so he slammed against the counter, all his weight on the wrist he put out to steady himself, watched pain puddle in Jensen’s eyes and heard the rattle of chemicals and trays.

“Jared, what the fuck—”

Jared took half a step forward. He didn’t know if he wanted to help or hurt Jensen more, didn’t have a handle on where and how his thoughts formed, but before he could do anything Jensen reacted, years of reflex from living on a street with too many squabbling, quick-limbed boys. One fist out and thumb stuck out, a hard hit that rocked Jared back, and before the throb of it died they were scrabbling, like children, hips crashing into counters, trying to hold each other flat. Jared banged his head, or they both did, whatever, and he lost balance and fell on one side of the counter. He let go of Jensen’s wrist, heard Jensen’s weight drop to the floor too; quick gasps just around the corner and out of sight. There was sharp pain from his rattled skull, radiating all the way down to his spine, and he was blinking away globes of color, drowning in it, wondering if his brain was too, shriveling while blood pooled out of it.

Quiet settled in.

“Jared.” Jensen said. “Jay. Are you all right?”

“I’m sorry,” he could hear Jensen moving, “I’m sorry,” he said again. The counter was cold against his back, felt like good support. He breathed out in a sharp exhale when Jensen crowded into the space, slotting his shoulder alongside Jared’s.

“That was really stupid.” Jensen said. “That was just—that was ridiculous.”

He didn’t sound mad though. If anything, Jensen just sounded surprised, and soft. Jared didn’t look at him, kept his gaze focussed firmly on the door in front. After a while he heard Jensen sigh and felt his fingers in his hair, searching for bumps, for breaks. Cold, chemical-wet fingertips on his scalp; light pressure. When Jensen was sure he was whole, at least outwardly, his hand dipped lower and wrapped around the back of Jared’s neck, thumb circling from the top of his spine to where his hair softened into curls.

“You’re okay,” Jensen said, too firmly to mean just about Jared having banged his head.

“I did _not_ tell you to fuck off.”

“Hmm,” Jensen said, his hand crawling up Jared’s thigh. “I know not to believe you the next time, don’t I?”

*

“You were gone. You were sick, then you were gone, and then I didn’t know what to say.”

“ _Hi_ ,” Jared said, to the background noise of Jensen’s camera clicking serenely and independently. “That’s how people start conversation.”

“Well, you didn’t say _hi,_ either.”

 _Because you almost killed me,_ Jared didn’t say. Instead, he broke a chip off the wing of a marble angel. The cemetery was quiet, this late at night, and frosty. _Fortean photography,_ Jensen had explained, and now the camera clicked and clicked while they sat atop somebody’s grave. Jensen smoked. Jared thought of telling him _you shouldn’t do that,_ but he wasn’t one to say, he had angel-chip between his lips.

The marble tasted hoary with frost. It sent a thrill through his spine, wrecking him while he bit down, and where Jared’s arm dangled off the edge of the cement platform, he felt his fingers skim the graveyard dirt, an involuntary curl, fingernails coming away wet with dew.

Jensen watched him and broke off a piece too, curious-like, but Jared said, “Stop, stop. You might like it,” and pried it from him.

“What was it like?” Jensen asked.

 “What?” Jared mumbled, but knew Jensen was asking about the Quiet Months.

“I came to see you. I don’t know if you remember—”

Jared frowned. “Did you play _Nine Inch Nails?_ ”

“You wanted me to,” Jensen said, looking down at the ground. “And then you wanted me to go away. You were kind of—vocal.”

 _I had you confused with a trepanning-enthusiastic doctor._ “Oh. I didn’t mean that.”

“Inconvenient. Because I was planning on asking you to be better soon, I missed you. And, I thought, hey, I never asked if you wanted to actually smoke up with me, not just one of Sonia’s stupid-ass herbal joints. I bet if you smoked up with me you’d tell me all sorts of crazy things.”

“I don’t even remember—”

“You were on some weird-ass meds.”

“I think I’m mad,” Jared confessed, choking a little on the words. “Still. I think I’m crazy and I don’t trust myself.”

“I know,” said Jensen. He crawled until he was almost on Jared’s lap, pressed his palms to either side of Jared’s face, “I don’t care,” he said, cheerfully, “I really, really don’t.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh, that now? Now we need to be serious.”

His kiss tasted like smoke, tongue slippery and licking into Jared’s mouth, sucking at his teeth. Jared couldn’t find his arms, or his brain for that matter, and it wasn’t until Jensen was pushing at his shirt collar, his hot mouth latching onto Jared’s collarbone, that Jared got with the program. His fingers skimmed over Jensen’s belly, spread wide, before dipping down to palm Jensen’s dick through his jeans.

Jensen pulled back with a surprised yelp, flushed and breathless, spearing Jared with that bright stare but arching into his touch. Jared found Jensen’s crucifix earring and pulled at it with its teeth, the metal cold and just _weird_ to taste, and he could suck at it forever, listen to Jensen gasp and laugh in his ear while he tried to reach between Jared’s thighs, to fondle the hot shape of his cock.

“I’ll tell you a crazy thing,” Jared said breathlessly when they ended up on the ground, Jared’s pants pushed down to his ankles and his heels scraping up dirt, while Jensen’s spit-slicked fingers slid into him: three in quick succession, drawing soft screams from Jared, his fingers clawing up Jensen’s back and curling into the dirt while Jensen stretched him open. The position was uncomfortable: there were roots on the ground pressing up against Jared, and his shoulder kept jamming against the grave, but Jensen’s mouth was chasing Jared’s nipple, hot circles of damp forming on his shirt where Jensen sucked and tugged, near-causing Jared to completely leap off the ground, his spine arching. Deep thrills of pleasure pooled at his groin, thickening him further. 

Jensen’s fingers pulled out, quiet moment to spend gasping up at the sky, but then he thrust, his body locking into Jared’s, and he pushed and pushed, groaning as Jared writhed and clenched down on him. He worked himself inside Jared, somewhat messy, syncopated, sending strains of pleasure that gathered like kite-strings for Jensen to tug at and make him moan. And Jared didn’tactuallytell Jensen the crazy thing, too far gone and focused on riding out the crest of sensation slow and even, but he could think of only one thing that would light his nerves up on fire like this, like this, with Jensen fucking into him slow and sure: electroshock, _electrochoque,_ and call him crazy but the thought made him smile into the dirt, even as he came into Jensen’s hand, and _pit-pat-pat_ in the dirt like the start of rain.

*

Jared’s grandaunt once thought there was a siren walking around the restaurant post midnight. She would scratch and scrabble at the windows, hissing at the siren to leave her family alone, but one night she caved and opened the door. In the morning there was mud in viscous clumps all over the carpeting, and a bloody bathtub full of mad grandaunt.

Jared’s mom kept grandaunt’s long silver knife, used it cut off pieces of granite from an elephant statue his Dad had bought at some flea market. Granite was earthy and grounding, but also sharp on the tongue, sometimes cutting through the soft flesh. That only made it better.

The shoes filled and overflowed under Jared’s bed. The work of a ghost. He did something to capture it and now it stayed, oh, mild ghost that spoke nightmares and filled shoes. Grandaunt would rather the siren than insanity, and sometimes Jared looked at the shoes, prayed, _please_ : _because ghosts._

*

“Dude, you were twelve.”

Jared wasn’t looking at Jensen, _wasn’t,_ he was looking at the enlargers and the ghostly photos on the pegs and the jars of chemistry—anything _but_ Jensen. He smiled at the ground, experimentally, embarrassed. “Couldn’t be.”

Jensen made a humming noise. He stood opposite, leaning against the counter, and the ember-tip of his cigarette was a miniature sun in the dark. “I remember Alice. You two were inseparable, which is probably the only reason—”

“— _las_ girlfriends even let me come to the street in the first place? I know that.”

“Yeah, but, you were twelve when she died.”

 (Jared’s mother, by the way, kept mistaking a dressmaker’s mannequin for her mother; the boxcars of insanity lined up very neatly in this family.)

“Huh.”

“She bit the train,” Jensen said, and Jared nodded violently, sure of that at least. Jensen sighed. “Hey, your dad said not to bring this up, but you scared me, this summer, you’ve got to tell me—you weren’t trying to kill yourself, were you?”

“What? No!”

Jensen looked at him inscrutably, eyes narrowing. “I told the guys that. But you were too close to the tracks. That train was due, and I kept thinking — if we hadn’t almost ran into you...and you looked spooked. You ran away.”

“I left my shoes.”

“Did you?”

Jared closed his eyes and tried to breathe, suddenly unglued, overboard, lost at sea. The air smelled sweet with the herb smoke. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth; felt sick inside. He knew at that moment that probably, quite possibly, the pond hadn’t been real either. Or even the shoes. Everything in his head was illusory, not trustworthy, a mirage maze he could get lost in.

Jared took out the roll of film he kept in his pocket; felt a wildness take over him, a craziness.

“What are you doing?”

“There are some pictures I need to develop.”

“Okay,” Jensen said. “But it’s almost time to go. We’re going home today, remember? So _las_ girlfriends—stupid name, by the way—can squeal over how thin I’ve gotten.”

Jared let go of his negatives, then rethought and began pushing them into an envelope instead. “Mom had a darkroom,” he said. “Maybe this’ll work better at home.”

*

If you stood on the tracks when the train came, head held high and trembling from toe to crown, watching the iron-smelting, speeding metal-monster hurtle right toward you, it would be like looking the Grim Reaper right in her face. The boys in the street talked of _santa_ _muerte,_ the Lady of Death. You could catch a glimpse of her, between you and the train, the sea in your peripheral vision blue and everything like life, her grin in your face yellow and everything like death.

The train was unstoppable, indecipherable weight: it could shatter you on impact. But only if you let it, oh, only if you stayed on those tracks. You could jump aside at the last moment and watch it whizz by, singe your hair with its screaming passage, pelt you with tiny pieces of gravel and stone. You could jump aside and know it couldn’t kill you.

“Take us if you can!” hooted Alice. She was there to cheat Death, laugh at it like the boys from the street who kept jumping in its path. Her hair was wild, she trembled. Drops of sweat stood out on her forehead, her upper lip. Her smile was wide. She was—they were—twelve.

Jared’s special roll had some train pictures.

“Jesus,” Jensen said, his voice rumbling where Jared’s ear was pressed to his breastbone. He held a photo to sunlight, blinking. “Is this me? How long have you had this thing?”

 “Years. I didn’t—it was a normal roll at first. And then it became...special.”

Meaning he only used it for Bad Things, strange things, things he wasn’t sure anyone else could see.

Though Jensen could see himself—age twelve or thirteen—overexposure or the sun blinding out his face so he looked golden, half-faceless, only his wide grin still visible. He stood with knees spread and arms out and brave on the train tracks, with a miniature iron-grey monster looming in the horizon behind him.

“It was her idea. She liked to watch, see if the train ever did anything surprising.”

Jensen rifled through more photos. And then he paused. “Oh. Oh no,” he said, quietly, and Jared knew what he was looking at, had looked at the photo the whole night. Alice smiling, same pose as everyone else with the train still toy-like in her background, but the fear so clear on her brow. “Was this right before—”

“I don’t know. Seconds, maybe. I ran. She—couldn’t.”

Something about the way her hair had blown in that photo gave it dynamics, made his gut tighten every time he looked at it. It seemed at once that he could hear the engine screaming, pistons working, that hot angry rush along the tracks, devouring everything on the way. Even at dusk in the beach with sea-breeze rushing cool all around him, Jared could feel the hot wind billowing in the wake of its passing, the smell of it, the sound of it seizing his heartbeat and forcing it to jerk along to its loud, senseless rhythm.

And Alice. _You didn’t push her, but you kept her,_ thought Jared. There were lots of weird tales surrounding cameras, photos, impermissible moments caught on film.

_Lodged a splinter in my brain, she did._

Jensen sat up, brushing sand from his hair. He flicked his lighter on, caught the tip of the flame to the photo, and let it burn. “To Alice, okay?” he said, scooping up the ashes, sooty wrist all that was left of it, and then the sea took it from him, washed him clean.  

“You ask me,” Jensen said, hands on Jared’s hips holding him steady against the waves. “When you’re not sure, play your _true_ or _false_ game with me. Just don’t push me away, again. I mean it, dude.”

“I know.” Jared said. And then he frowned.

“What?”

“It’s just hard to trust you when your hair is half green.”

Jensen laced his fingers together to fit like a cap over his head. The sun swept dregs of dying light through his fingers. He grinned. “Now?”

Jared nodded. “Now.”

*

Sonia made them hold hands. They did it surreptitiously, watching the _viejos_ sitting outside their homes fanning themselves, the gaggle of kids that kept running in and out of gates and courtyards that didn’t really mark any boundaries between homes. Jensen was grinning though, ear-to-ear, at Sonia’s hard-headed insistence to treat them as a couple now that she knew, at Jared’s embarrassment at being here on the street with every passer-by throwing curious looks. He smiled at them with what he hoped wasn’t too bright a smile, not enough to carve deep dents into his cheek, and didn’t know where to look.

Her cigar rubbed to ashes on the ground, Sonia leaned to look, while Jensen mock-presented Jared with a bright red wildflower. It alarmed him how black the centre was, but he stuck it behind his ear, and it made Jensen laugh. Jared thought of how that made him feel, and couldn’t find adequacy in any word he knew.

“That’s a ship,” Sonia read in the ashes, Spanish lilting. “It’s good luck. And that’s a storm past.”

There were cows, black cats, half-moons and sugar-tea in their future.

“And this,” she said, an ending note creeping into her tone, “ _this_ is a shoe.”

Jared looked up so sharply, he almost cricked his neck. “Meaning what?”

Sonia shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes, the ashes don’t tell whole stories.”

Jared’s brain obstinately refused to think of anything but shoes then, but Jensen, on his newly launched quest to keep Jared this side of sane to reap the benefits of it, put it out of his mind by backing him up against a wall in someone’s deserted compound.

His toes barely skimming the ground, Jensen working in him fast, Jared let his head fall back against the wall, saw only blue sky for a minute, pleasure building in him while his mind short-circuited. He wanted to scream, but there was Jensen, snuffing it out with his mouth. He tightened his hold around Jensen’s shoulder, looked straight at him, his hair dishevelled and mouth swollen and eyes half-mast but bright, and in that electric split-second before his orgasm hit, he thought he saw a flash, a spectre, an illusion.

 _False,_ he thought, bonelessly, then stronger: _false._  

*

_True or false, Jensen, are there shoes under my bed?_

Jensen looked, leaning upside down over the edge of Jared’s dorm-room bed.

“Huh,” he said, and pulled them out. They were dry but stained, the insides of them crusted over with a rusty color. “True, I guess? Why?”

Jared just looked at them, relieved, bewildered: maybe he wasn’t crazy after all.

“Because ghosts,” he said.

 

 

 

 

 

      

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
